Nick Jonas, Paul Rudd
“POWER BALLAD” My rating: B (In theaters)
98 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Goofball affability comes so naturally to Paul Rudd that it’s easy to forget that with the right material he’s a formidable performer.
He gets just such an opportunity in the bittersweet dramady “Power Ballad,” the latest from writer/director John Carney and, like his memorable “Once” from a decade back, a look into the life and dreams of a struggling Dublin musician.
The screenplay by Carney and Peter McDonald centers on Rick, the American-born (Kansas City, no less) lead singer of Bride and Groove, a quintet billed as Ireland’s premiere wedding band.
Rick has an Irish wife and daughter (Marcella Plunkett, Beth Fallon), a modest house in the ‘burbs and a vast backlog of unfinished songs,. He dreams — literally — of selling out arenas to sing his compositions. In the meantime he and his bandmates schlep around in a tour van playing gigs in which they cover, practically note for note, the pop catalog of the last 50 years.
These opening segments are crammed with sly observations about fiftysomething geezers pounding out rock ’n’ roll and donning glasses to read the fine print. They also establish that Paul Rudd can actually sing.
One of the wedding guests at their latest gig is none other than Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), formerly famous as part of a boy band but now struggling to establish a solo career. At the request of the bride Danny joins the band for a few songs.
He and Rick share a moment on stage and, after the reception has shut down, spend the rest of the night trading riffs over a piano and a good single-malt whiskey. Rick plays some stanzas from a song he’s been working on for 15 years; Danny makes a few suggestions. Damned if it doesn’t sound pretty good.
A year later Rick is shopping in a Dublin mall when over the piped-in Muzak he hears…yes, his song. It’s pretty obvious that Danny Wilson has claimed the tune as his own and turned it into an international hit.
The major plot thread here is Rick’s seemingly hopeless quest to get recognition for the song. It isn’t so much the money the tune has generated (although he wouldn’t mind getting some of it) but the principle of the thing.
Here’s the problem. Rick cannot prove to anyone — even his family — that the song is his. He never recorded it, and any early versions he committed to paper can be dismissed as recent forgeries. Knowing he’s being cheated threatens to push the poor guy over the edge.
Marcella Plunket, Paula Rudd
Rudd is really terrific as an Everyman whose obsession is driving away his friends, co-workers and even loved ones. Finally, after all attempts to contact Danny Wilson have been rejected, he buys a plane ticket and with his scuzzy bandmate Sandy (Peter McDonald, the film’s co-writer) heads off to La-La Land for a showdown.
This may be Rudd’s best work since the underappreciated 2013 gem “Prince Avalanche” (it’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime…watch it), with his innate likability providing a vital counterpoint to Rick’s self-destructive fame fixation.
He’s nicely matched by Jonas’ turn as a guy so desperate to get back on top that he puts his conscience on the back burner. Danny is clearly the villain of the piece, but Jonas’ perf and the writing make his transgressions understandable if not acceptable.
And practically stealing his every scene is McDonald as the boozy, guitar-shredding Sandy. (Think Bill Nighy in “Love Actually.”)
The tone Carney achieves here reminds a lot of Bill Forsythe, especially 1984’s “Comfort and Joy.” It’s a tightrope act that bends back and forth between mild comedy and real emotional pain.
My one objection to “Power Ballad” is a brief coda tacked on the end, a sort of cop-out that plays to the cheesy expectations of the least-sophisticated viewers and undermines what up to then had been a ambivalent but deeply satisfying conclusion. I wouldn’t be surprised if some studio suit told Carney he had to tack it on.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 